Captain Michael Rose

Captain Rose, an internist at Fort Sam Houston, Texas, talks about the advantage...

Captain Michael Rose
01:35

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Technology That Heals: Army Uses Latest Technology for Patient Care

Army doctors are conducting cutting edge research. Learn how these Army physicians are using the latest technology to put patient care first.

My name is Grant Evans. I'm a Captain in the United States Army. And I'm a staff urologist. My goal had always been to serve in the military. And then I decided that I wanted to go into Medicine and the U.S. Army healthcare team was the best way to accomplish both of those goals. So I applied for a United States Army Health Professions Scholarship. This allowed me to attend medical school with the Army paying for my tuition, my books. It made a huge difference. I first met Dr. Chung when I was an intern here at Brooke Army Medical Center. My name is Lieutenant Colonel Kevin Chung, medical intensivist, at the U.S. Army Institute of Surgical Research Burn Center. Capt. Evans was a surgical resident who rotated through the burn ICU. He really embraced his role as a surgical resident and really went above and beyond to help care for these patients. He was very passionate about teaching and about making sure that all of those things were kind of integrated together. Excellent patient care, with an excellent education for those of us that were trying to learn from him.Burn injury is one of the most severe injuries a human being can sustain. And to be able to help manage that is something that is very challenging. The burn intensive care unit here at Brooke Army Medical Center is probably the most cutting edge burn intensive care unit in the world. It is multi-disciplinary medical care at its best. If you're burned anywhere around the world, and you're in the military, you're going to be taken care of here. I think the patient population that we take care of in Army healthcare is probably the most deserving patient population in the world. And I think we have an obligation to provide the best possible care to those people because they're sacrificing for us, we need to sacrifice for them, too. When I'm not in the burn center doing my clinical job, I'm doing research. Our focus is on wound healing and the studies are quite varied in nature. For instance, a patient that's burned 90% of their body. You just don't have enough normal skin to harvest. And so, a skin substitute is really a game changer. There’s another product. You take a small piece of skin, separate out the cells, and spray it onto a partial thickness wound and it helps accelerate wound healing. It's something that could dramatically change the way we care for burn wounds. I've been using robotic surgical systems since I was a resident. Operating with a surgical robot allows for a surgeon to perform minimally invasive surgery with a stable platform that takes human resting tremor and things out of the equation with extreme magnification and binocular 3-D vision. It allows for quicker recovery times with less operative pain. There's always something new to learn. There's always someone who's been doing it longer than you. There's always an opportunity to interact with people from other specialties. I can be a clinician one day. The next I can be a researcher. The next I can be an educator. You have incredible access to technology. Your patients have access to all the care that they need. And no matter what field of medicine you want to go into, you have every opportunity in the world to pursue those goals with Army healthcare.